Lifeline
by JustCallMeMarly
Summary: A drabble of adjustments, friendship, and voids that war provides in excess...


**_A/N: I honestly don't know what prompted this. It kind of just spilled out of my brain at a late, late hour in the night. Be kind and let me know what you think anyways…_**

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Lifeline

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He rolls over at night. And when his eyes open, he's back in Korea. He can hear the shelling, he can see Charles sitting at his record player, he can see B.J mending his socks… But he's not in Korea anymore. The blood has since stopped running endlessly over his hands… but it still stains them.

Nights are the hardest. He supposes that is only natural. Usually, in those three god-awful years, they are all stuck in meatball surgery at this time of night… no end in sight to the line of human cheese graters.

The blood _has_ since stopped flowing over his forever-stained hands. The bodies of young men, young women, even children no longer lay in front of him so that he can pick the unfairness out of them piece by metal piece. Yet, those hours in the dark, in the eerie silence of Crabapple Cove, he still transports back to a time where things weren't supposed to make sense, but they do all the same.

Crabapple Cove is too quiet. It was the first thing he'd noticed after he'd stepped out of his father's car. _Not_ a jeep. Captain Hawkeye Pierce – Captain no more – had almost gone into a panic attack because he'd missed the sound of mortar rounds and shelling.

In medical school, he'd heard of post-partum depression. In fact, that entire study fascinated him. He could never understand how women, after suffering nine months of discomfort, pain, and excruciating emotional roller coasters, could be depressed about birthing the very being that had caused it all. But then… he'd never been in a war before.

There were no words his father could utter that night that could take that panic away or abate that fear he'd felt at his first step onto his home soil in three years. So, he'd left his bag right there next to that old Chevy and ran into the house. First order of business? Reign in the sanity he had been sure arriving home would bring. Little did he know that such a simple eleven digit number would become a lifeline.

"Beej?" He is back in the present and the voice on the other end of the line is just as awake as he is, despite the late hour it was for both of them.

"Hawk…" his other half, a whole continent away, greets.

"Can't sleep?" Hawkeye asks, concern for the other man overriding his own selfish motivations. He could almost see the shrug from his friend as a chuckle sounds over the line.

"You ask that all the time, every call. I doubt the answer's going to change," B.J says. Hawkeye smiles.

"Call me an optimist in that I hope it will," he says. B.J laughs.

"You? An optimist?" he asks. Hawkeye scoffs.

"Well, we're doctor's aren't we? We're required to be optimists," he says.

"No, not you," B.J says, almost somberly. "You always were a contradiction to everything…" It is said with love.

"I'll take that as a compliment," Hawkeye says. B.J laughs again. It is a laugh that comforts Hawkeye more than anything ever could. It brings back all the memories of everything good that Korea had given him. It shadows over all those bad moments.

"You okay, Hawk?" B.J's voice brings him back.

"Just reminiscing," he answers.

"Remember the time we got Charles to believe that he was losing too much weight?" B.J asks. Hawkeye grins. B.J laughs at the memory. "He didn't talk to us for a week after that!" Hawkeye sighs.

"That was the best week ever…" he says. The two men fall into silence.

"I'm sorry to keep calling you like this," Hawkeye finally says.

"I'm not," B.J says back. The honesty of the statement startles Hawkeye for a moment.

"Are you okay, Beej?" he asks. The other man sighs.

"I'm as fine as I can get. But how do you explain to your wife that you don't sleep in your bed because you're afraid your nightmares will hurt her? How do you explain to your daughter that you didn't go away on purpose? How do you cope with the hurt when every time they look at you, they expect a different person?" he asks. Usually, it is Hawkeye that asks these desperate questions. The reversal of roles is an interesting one because he doesn't know the answers. B.J always does.

"I don't know. I don't have a wife or a daughter," he says simply. There is an ache in the pit of his stomach at the fact that there isn't anything he can say to his best friend to fix it. Hawkeye just didn't understand.

The two of them were two sides to one coin. Hawkeye the womanizer and B.J the family man. Hawkeye the crazy and B.J the rational. Hawkeye the loud and B.J the more subdued. Yet despite all that there is a common thread that runs through them both. It is why they talk at this hour in the night. But it is that lack of understanding on each of their parts that really connects them. The filling of the void in a time where life was ripped from them.

Now, there is another void to fill. The void of their old life. Some people go back to life as if it had paused the second they left American soil. The only problem was, Korea made them a different person and they don't fit that life anymore. No more than they would fit the life that had gone on living without them. For each person that had been there, they were damned either way.

Korea hadn't been a grand affair; a victory. When the time comes it will be a forgotten war. And just as the war will be forgotten, the soldiers, the doctors, the nurses and so on will be forgotten in their struggle to fill the void their past selves had left behind.

And B.J… all Hawkeye can do is return the years-long favor and remind his best friend that he had filled a void in more ways than one at a time Hawkeye needed it most. In fact, he still does.

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The End


End file.
